Watch: Creed McTaggart + Tom Morat On The Fender III

Get your hands on a Fender III here.

“Two minutes? Okay. Speed date. I was born in New Caledonia. I grew up there until I was 12, before moving to Noosa, Queensland. I spent from 12 until about 20 in Noosa. Started work at Thomas Surfboards when I was 15 before moving to California at the end of 2020. Eventually I decided to set up a glass shop with my homie Pierre in Biarritz and kind of realized I needed to start traveling as I was just kind of sacrificing my shitty pro surfing career. Now I’ve kind of given him the reins and I’m not so much living in Biarritz, more just bouncing around doing the surfing and shaping world tour.”

That was Tom Morat giving the Sparknotes summary of his life in precisely 74 seconds.  

“How was that?” he follows up. “Would you date me?”

Does a duck drag weed with a stiffy?

The Fender 3 as seen here is an evolution on his already very successful Fender 2, which Mikey February murdered in EAST and eventually declared runner-up. The main difference with the board Creed’s surfing here is that his has three equally sized fins and no flyer — we’ll get to the V3 specs in a moment.

“After the first EAST episode I probably averaged two orders a day, which for someone who handshapes, does their own customer service, glasses and sands everything themselves, was actually way too much,” explains Morat. “Like physically, way too much. So that was fucking crazy. A full: be careful what you wish for moment.”

Following the Grand Finale, Morat went straight to Palm Springs for EASTFEST to get his first ever chlorine tubes and sip cocktails. From there, the metallic bird Down Under to complete a shaping residency at Wild Things, the boutique Byron-Bay Surf Co, and chip away at his backlog.

Creed, who is Wild Things’ equivalent of The Stig from Top Gear, testing all sorts of marvelous creations stocked in shop — from BMT’s to Shyama Buttonshaws — requested one himself. 

“Creed is so good at hopping on anything and making it look amazing. He’s incredibly versatile and adaptable. We had a quick chat, but rather than making him a Fender 2, I wanted to take a risk and try something new. The Fender 3 is basically just a little more high-performance ‘cos I’m pussyfooting into the HP world and I don’t want to be pigeonholed in a niche little pocket of alternative twin fins or whatever.”

The short of it is: the Fender 3 has the same underlying ideas of the Fender 2, but pushed into a more performance-oriented spec. Low rocker, tweaked rails up front to compensate, refined bottom contours to better match the outline. He removed the flyer on Creed’s board, but he’s not convinced.

“I deleted the flyer… but I kind of want to add it back,” he admits. “I’m realizing it gives the water somewhere to shoot out of.”

Morat isn’t misty-eyed and romantic on why he shapes. “If I could just surf, I would,” he says. “I wouldn’t make boards for anyone else. I’m only making boards because I need it to survive and keep the whole thing alive. And secondly… it’s just curiosity. It’s so fucking annoying trying to explain to a shaper what you want. I don’t want a middleman between the board and me. Plus, it allows me to stay in the world I want to be in, which is surfing.”

The other benefit of surfing lots in parallel with mowing foam, is the primacy of feedback. “When I made Mikey’s boards, I made myself one the same day,” he says. “I took it to Mexico straight away and I already knew: this needs work, this needs work. Then watching Mikey surf, I knew exactly what to look for. Is he having the same problem? Is it flattening out at the end of a carve?”

Same process with Creed. Less guess work, more diagnosing.

“There’s a term we have in French: Tirer les vers du nez. Basically it means to pull the worms out of someone’s nose. That’s kind of how I extract feedback. I’m like ‘are you feeling this?’ ‘are you feeling that?’ and everything we felt, we agreed on.”

How Surfboards Get Made.